See the gnarled bloke in the picture, the one with the gold teeth who looks like a cross between Sean Bean and Feargal Sharkey? He's one of the stars of the new Toast men's campaign, which was shot at Brooklands racing track in Surrey. Yes, that's right, Toast, of the gently rustic Hovis-ad aesthetic. It doesn't stop at the gold teeth, either. Elsewhere in the campaign it's finger, knuckle and bicep tattoos agogo. Tattoos, I tell you! Next thing you know there'll be bare-knuckle fighting.

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There's plenty of saturated colour, too. In fairness, colour is not something Mr Toast - aka the very genial designer Jamie Seaton - has ever been particularly averse to, as shown by the fabulous acid-bright mohair knits punctuating all the charcoal, navy and black in the autumn-winter collection just gone. But they must have put something in the water round Carmarthenshire way, where he lives, for he's really let rip for this spring/summer, turning up the knob marked brightness at the same time as making the whole feeling a little less poetic and more fairground-worker rugged. Think garment-dyed T-shirts in clean jade, slouchy hoodies in pink marled cotton, and loosely structured field jackets that look and feel like old wardrobe faithfuls. I love it.

Breton crew top, £79, and shawl-collar pullover, £135.

It's not the most extensive of collections but it is, as always with Toast, really well considered. "Our men's is so small a collection that I find it easy to come up with the ideas," says James. "It's almost a holiday from the mass of my other work and thus I approach it pretty lightheartedly. I'm designing clothes I'd like to wear - or think my friends would, or my son and his friends. But I do like clothes with some resonance - a hint of a reference to something historical or such."

Plimsolls, £49.

There's nothing too esoteric about his inspiration for summer - he says he tends simply to start with the idea of long, lotus-eating days - but "there are two pictures that I return to again and again. The first is the Robert Capa photograph of Picasso and Françoise Gilot on the beach in the South of France, Picasso holding a giant parasol above Gilot. The second is the Lee Miller photo of Man Ray, Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose etc picnic-ing near Cannes. Both shots are lighthearted, sun-drenched, full of geniality and with a frisson of eroticism." And we're all for a bit of that.

I've picked out some of my favourite images and items from the new collection, but you can see the full works online from this Monday (27 February), in Toast's Bath, Cheltenham, Guildford, Oxford, Islington and Westbourne Grove, London stores, or in the new pop-up shop that opens in Marylebone next week.
toast.co.uk